Wedding Crashers Don’t Have to #%$@ing RSVP

Check out this D.C. Craigslist RNR flamebait:

washington, DC craigslist > northern virginia > rants & raves

Couple in need
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Reply to: [please-dont-flame-the-happy-hubby-2-b]@craigslist.org
Date: 2009-03-21, 8:08AM EDT

This is a long shot, but here goes. I am 38 year old dealing with overwhelming task of getting married for the first time. My future wife and I are both employed, hard working tax paying citizens. She owns a condo in Las Vegas which unfortunatley has be to be short sold to get out from under that burden. At our age we basically are paying for our wedding by ourselves, which is putting further and further in debt. I can easily say it is the best investment we both have ever made! Unfortunatley we are still in need of help. With only 1 month till the big date. That is why I am posting this. If find you can donate, even a little bit I could not thank you enough.

God Bless
Jason
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Re: Couple in “need”                      (the courthouse steps)

“Love:  A temporary insanity curable by marriage.”
—Ambrose Bierce

Regarding this beggar bridegroom and his “long shot” at satisfying his nuptial “need”:

Maybe “Jason” still believes in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, too.

Otherwise, why is he begging a bunch of strangers on Craigslist to help pay for his catering bills?  Is he even trying to hit up his parents or his fiancée’s parents?  Is he shaking down his buddies and his girlfriend’s girlfriends?  After all, at least those folks can look forward to attending this blessed celebration that he’s not even inviting us to crash in his charmless appeal.

When “Jason” and his lovely bride-to-be made these wedding arrangements many months ago, there were obvious signs that we were already heading into a recession, if we weren’t there already.

Besides that, if he’s 38, that means he was in his early twenties when the last recession hit.  Of course, it could very well be that it didn’t hit him too hard back then, either.

Perhaps like a lot of D.C.-area workaholics, he is already married—to his career—and doesn’t have a concrete idea of how dire things are out here for many people.

Maybe he somehow thinks that asking anonymous strangers to help finance a wedding is not an asinine thing to do in an economy where anonymous strangers are losing their jobs, having to drop out of school to pay their bills, postponing retirement because their life savings are depleted, witnessing their businesses fold, and sacrificing their health while trying to stay afloat.

He may believe that asking for donations to carry on a lavish rite-of-passage party is not a tacky thing to do at a time when people are getting kicked out of their housing, watching their marriages & relationships fail, trying to explain unsettling new realities to their kids without upsetting them, having their “friends” turn their backs on them, losing their minds and their identities, becoming victims of crime as those with less scruples grow even more selfish and desperate, and more.

To be fair to “Jason,” so many people in our generation get suckered in by our parents, our friends, our sad-sack middle-class assumptions about the “American Dream,” and the extortionists of the wedding & hospitality industries who prey upon the princess-for-a-day fantasies of brides-to-be.

I’ve been to a few weddings in the last ten years where the families blew tens of thousands of dollars on a weekend—only to find out that the blessed couple filed for divorced within 3-5 years anyways...  Many of these were extravagant affairs that were almost embarrassing to participate in because of all of the tasteless excess.  Half the time we didn’t even know why these conspicuous consumers and careless carousers invited us to these over-the-top shindigs, as we barely knew the couple or the family.

“In economics, a study (done by Pew Charitable Trusts, the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Urban Institute) challenged the notion that each generation will be better off than the one that preceded it.[16] The study, 'Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well?' focuses on the income of males 30-39 in 2004 (those born April, 1964 – March, 1974) and is based on Census/BLS CPS March supplement data.[17]

The study, released May 25, 2007, emphasized that in real dollars, this generation made less (by 12%) than had their fathers at the same age in 1974, thus reversing a historical trend. The study also suggests that per year increases in the portion of father/son family household income generated by fathers/sons have slowed (from an average of 0.9% to 0.3%), barely keeping pace with inflation, though increases in overall father/son family household income are progressively higher each year because more women are entering the workplace, contributing to family household income.[18]”
—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X

I don’t know what the facts on Gen Y are but they can’t be very good either.

Our baby boomer parents have done a lot of us a huge disservice.  Their rules no longer apply to many of us but they still keep at it, urging us to follow in their footsteps and hit all the adult milestones in the correct order, at the right time, just like they did.

I just want all you older (boomer and Gen Jones) folks to know that we are not all as blissfully oblivious and shameless as “Jason” appears to be.

More “Me decade” Redux and Madness

Happy Friday the 13th for the second month in a row.

“I’m as mad as a hatter and I’m not going to take you any more...”

You may or may not recognize that as a corruption of the famous line screamed by apoplectic news anchor Howard Beale in Network (1976):

“I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more...”

He builds up to this crescendo after saying other things that eerily resonate with our current climate of anxiety:
“I don’t have to tell you things are bad.
Everybody knows things are bad.
It’s a depression.
Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job.
....
Banks are going bust.
Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter.
Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere that seems to know what to do and there’s no end to it.
....
We know things are bad, worse than bad, they’re crazy.
It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy so we don’t go out anymore.
We sit in the house and slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller and all we say is,
‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms ... just leave us alone.’”

When the madman utters the climactic line, he is exhorting the Everyman, the Silent Majority impassively assembled in the anemic blue glow of their living room television sets, to literally get up out of their seats and go scream their outrage out their windows.

Paddy Chayefsky, the creator of this timeless American character, explained his attitude about Network like this:

“People say to me: ‘Jesus, you moved into some pretty surreal satire.’  I say:  ‘No, I still write realistic stuff.  It’s the world that’s gone nuts, not me.  It’s the world that's turned into a satire."  We never lied.  Everything in the movie is true—with some extensions.  It's very hard to describe simply and realistically what is going on without being grotesque.  I think the movie is right now. .... I think the American people deserve some truth—at least as much truth as we can give them—instead of pure entertainment or pure addiction.”—“Chayefsky: ‘Network Is True’,” Time, 12/13/1976

I was reminded of the Network rant scene for the umpteenth time recently while checking out “Silver Spring, Singular,” a downcounty blog that attracts a lot of attention because of its whip-smart & candid writing, topical currency, and its connectedness to the goings-on of greater Silver Spring.  Plus, it’s got plenty of photos and graphics and the blogger keeps comments open to Anonymice, which makes things livelier and more engaging.

SSS introduces a recent post with the following:

“I don’t know about on yours, but the locals on my neighborhood message board are mad as hell about the ‘melee’ in [downtown Silver Spring] this past Saturday and they aren't going to take it anymore!”
[Acronym expansion, formatting, & linking all added.]

SSS accompanies the post with a movie still from the Angry Man classic Falling Down (1993), which left me scratching my head over the madman movie mixed metaphors.

SSS: “... the regularly expressed opinion that ‘it's just like that in Bethesda’ is total bulls***.  Anyone who says this has clearly never been to Bethesda.”

Springular sure got that right.  Downtown Bethesda invests a lot of money in attracting the right crowd of self-actualizing professionals and big spenders.  BUP and friends do a bang-up job of keeping baggy-pants, saggy-seat crews out of their scrubbed urban districts.

The most aggressive people you’ll encounter in Bethesda generally include the Type-A jerks that jockey for the plummest parking spots in the downtown garages, the aging frat boy drunks that frequent “Caddies” on Cordell Avenue, and the Valet Parking Mafia that extort fat tips out of west-county and NWDC gentry flush with an embarrassment of disposable income.  While some of these potential rowdies may threaten bodily harm if you make the mistake of wasting their time or delaying their gratification, none of them is very likely to break out in fisticuffs with you.

123cartoon on WashingtonPost.com quips:
“The ‘Stop the Violence’ concert is over. You may now return to your previous violent nature. Thank you for coming.”

»»»

Sublime Magic theatre. Entrance not for everyone. For madmen only.

«««

Here’s an English etymological enigma.  “Mad” variously means angry, crazy, and a combination thereof.  Why and how did this come about?  Is there psychological research that bears out the observation that raging makes can make you raving?

SSS: “Also, while people certainly have every right to be upset, some use this as an excuse to prop up their bogus theories about how these miscreants will invade Silver Spring throughout the week once the Fillmore is open. Yes, because those Seal (actual Fillmore performer) crowds can get completely out of hand.”

Hey now, once Seal starts singing some of his more provocative lyrics, what if the crowd starts to take it a tad too literally:

“But we’re never gonna survi-i-i-i-ve unless, we get a little crazy...”

Now back to more madcap madness:

Thayer Avenue said [on SSS’s blog]:
How did you gain such a penchant for drawing in the crazy people to the comment board? I never cease to be amazed.

And “Thayer Avenue” said this before I added my damage to the mix.

I splenically snorted in return:
“‘Thayer Avenue’?  Perhaps this proud member of the Nouveau Silver Spring gentry should try on the address and blogger moniker ‘Woodmont Avenue.’  It appears that Thayer doesn’t much care for the untidy opinings of us ‘crazy’ east-county riff-raff.

Springular, how did you gain such a penchant for drawing in the downcounty gentry to act as such wet blankets on the comment board?  I never cease to be crazed, er, amazed.”
[more crazy stuff followed this jabbering....]

Thayer Avenue said:
“Wow, Sleepless. I make an off-handed, generalized comment and you end up attacking me, The X-Files, *and* linking to classic Bernstein all in one fell swoop? Very impressive.

I think my work here is done!”

Indeed!

Springvale Roader informs us:
“Well folks, this is timely. This coming Sunday and Monday, AFI will be screening the documentary, ‘Crips and Bloods: Made in America.’ http://www.afi.com/silver/new/nowplaying/events.aspx#crips

I plan on wearing my red bandanna...or should I go with blue?”

Thomas Hardman weighs in:
“I was more hoping for a screening of ‘Lord of the Flies’.”

Well, here in the south-central loco-en-MoCo ’hood of west Wheaton, I guess we would have to sport blue bandannas to this cultural event, as MS-13 claims to be the dominant “click” in these here parts.

Yeah, so I’ve heard that the AFI Silver is trying to make it in this recession just like a lot of others arts-and-culture institutions.  May I suggest the following quadruple feature, curated by myself:

“The All-American Angry Man Film Marathon”
…featuring conniptive classics from the 1970s through the 2000s…
Network — 1970s
Ruthless People — 1980s
Falling Down — 1990s
Gran Torino — 2000s
Why, this could even be the basis for yet another AFI superlative list...

...“100 Years, 100 Rages” !

“How nifty, Barbie®’s fifty”

(WARNING: Skip this digressive post if you hate bubblegum pink and/or prefer to steer clear of the general morass of American popular culture.)

I watch the news semi-regularly and I’ll bet that more than a few Americans have noticed that the network news anchors have started softening their evening broadcasts with lots of uplifting, aw-shucks human-interest stories.

These segments are obviously meant to serve as antidotes to the steady stream of bad news bearishness bombarding us from the global marketplace.

Perhaps these salt-of-the-earth profiles of courage and altruism are there to inspire and shame the hoi polloi into staying put in their overstuffed couches instead of taking to the streets armed with steak knives and handguns.  (They could be right; many people seem to be pushing aside their woes and seeking comfort in entertainment and social connections right now.)

A few days back the well-coiffed talking head personality anchors were paying homage to that paragon of perfect, injection-molded plastic womanhood, Barbie^®, who débuted early in 1959.

Amidst the retrospective coverage of this pop culture milestone, I heard about a bizarre Mattel^® product launch from 1975, “Growing Up Skipper^®.”  This junior cousin of Barbie^® was an “action” figurine; if you cranked her arm, her torso elongated and her bust “grew.”

Actual marketing copy printed on the box:

“She’s 2 dolls in 1 for twice as much fun!”
“Make her grow from a young girl to a teenager in seconds!”
“Cute little girl! ... Tall, curvy teenager!”

This “toy” should have been packaged with a miniature paperback book:
Are You There God?  It’s Me, Body-Dysmorphic Skipper^®

For those of you who think that toys and play time don’t have a lasting impact on children, check out this caustically funny commentary [warning: language].  It’s a blistering account of mid-seventies childhood drama between the author and her cousin, allegedly the Growing Up Skipper^® doll’s “most fevered and devoted disciple.”

Incidentally, 1975 is the same year The Stepford Wives hit U.S. theaters, presenting Americans with an assault on the ideal of suburban domestic perfection by swapping pretty, docile, affluent suburban housewives with near-identical animatronic body doubles.

* * *
The media blitz on the Barbie^® merchandising empire & its cultural aftershocks led me to dig up an arty artifact from the eighties.
This unnamed cult film has a running time of about three-quarters of an hour and looks like it was partly shot on Super 8.  Official prints were yanked and destroyed in the wake of a copyright suit won about two decades ago.  Bootleg copies still circulate; I don’t name the filmmaker, title, or subject here because I don’t want the files to get pulled.  But if you have any familiarity with American popular music of the 1970s, then you can probably follow along here.

The film imaginatively dramatizes the real-life story of a woman was who the vocalist/drummer of a ubiquitous brother-and-sister pop powerhouse with lots of lush orchestral chart-topping hits throughout the early-to-mid-’70s.  (Can you guess which one?)

It’s a lovingly enacted 1:9-scale tragedy of female suffering, complete with painstakingly crafted miniature props and sophisticated mise-en-scène featuring Barbie^® line dolls outfitted in dead-ringer ’70s and early ’80s fashions.

Without further ado, click here (Youtube) if you’re still curious.  (Right after the page loads, try pausing the player in order to give the stream a chance to buffer footage a few minutes ahead.)

* * *

“The early seventies had felt like the last moment of pure, popular culture fantasy and fakeness that I shared with my parents, when we were still united in this image of happy American familyhood.  And The C________s’ music seemed especially emblematic of that time.”

—the auteur who directed and co-wrote the film linked above

What’s a little startling to me is this: as a child growing up in the Washington area in the late ’70s through mid-’80s, in many ways I lived in a late ’60s through mid-’70s time warp.  This is because my decidedly Establishment parents listened to a lot of WGAY* and their LP collection consisted of selections like the orchestral folk-pop stylings of The Sandpipers and the soundtrack to Ryan’s Daughter.

While my spouse’s boomer parents were more plugged into the “counterculture” and familiar with the mid-to-late Beatles catalogue and even ventured into the post-punk and new wave territory of bands like Talking Heads and the Clash, as a tyke I remember being enthralled by cheesy Las-Vegas-revue-like pop arrangements such as Steve Lawrence’s rendition of “Go Away Little Girl”.

This decade-lagging anachrony from early childhood may explain some of the chronic cultural disorientation and confusion that afflicts me to this day.

* * *
And finally we have Sonic Youth’s cover of a song that was a signature Top Ten hit by that same ’70s pop group.  (The Sonic Youth interpretation was originally released as part of a 1994 tribute album.)

The vid features Thurston Moore as Tragic Troubadour Ken™ and Kim Gordon as Rocker Chick Couture Barbie™.

* * *
So here’s wishing a belated happy birthday to that indestructible American icon, Barbie^®, and that princess of 1970s pop perfection, Karen C________ (March 2, 1950 – February 4, 1983).
* For those of you who didn’t live in the D.C. area before 1990 or so, WGAY was an adult contemporary easy-listening radio station.  (Its transmitter was located on Kemp Mill Road in Wheaton before it moved to the World Building in downtown Silver Spring.)

(More trivia:  According to this source, oddly enough, the “GAY” in WGAY originally stood for “Government And You” way back in the forties.)

Because confessions shouldn't just be for Catholics...

“Yours is the only version of my desertion
that I could ever subscribe to,
That is all that I can do.
. . .
You’re so cute when you're frustrated, dear
Yeah, you’re so cute when you're sedated, dear
Oh yes dear...
.
.
.
You are a past sinner, the last winner, and
everything we’ve come to,
(it) makes you you, you...”


Was Paul Banks taking the piss out of our cohort here?  He sounds like he was in thrall of a damaging friendship or affair here.

      

What if you screamed “INSOLVENCY!” at the top of your lungs in a crowded, chaotic “marketplace of ideas” in the middle of a global economic implosion?

Would some Globalist Stasi arrest you for your damaged tin-foil hat fomenting?

I felt a burning compulsion to unleash this conniption recently:

re: Is this for real? (FDIC)    (Solvency.........for now.......)

      

“And you will not reach me I am resenting a
position that’s past resentment and now
I can’t consider, and now there is this distance, so...

Sleep tight, grim rite,
we have two-hundred couches where you can
sleep tight, grim rite,
we have two-hundred couches where you can
sleep tight, grim rite,
we have two-hundred couches where you can
sleep tonight
    …You’re a simpleton…
sleep tonight
    …(You’re) a simpleton…
sleep tonight
    …Can I follow?…
sleep tonight
...”
[4] Turn on the Bright Lights, 2002

A very few people hear “dream right” instead of “grim rite,” which makes some contextual sense, but I just can’t hear it.

(Yes, I realize that this indie rock dirge is ~7 years old but I need to hear something other than the throbbing sobbing bass-line subwoofing coming from the neighbor’s unit.)

Bobos in Paradise?

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